


Do Not Go Gentle

by orphan_account



Series: More Beautiful for Having Been Broken [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Afterlife, Afterlife Bureaucracy, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 15:53:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9769220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Astra outlives her two human soulmates, but all is not lost.  There's some confusion in the afterlife as to who ends up where.  A sad story with a happy ending.  <3





	

* * *

Maggie was the first of the three to go.  
Astra had watched her beloveds age. Gracefully, beautifully, but they aged. The passage of time slowed their bodies a little, if not their wits. After forty years together, forty times around the small, pale yellow sun, her Maggie was beset by cancer, which ran in her family. Astra and Alex immediately abandoned all their other pursuits to search for a cure.

But Maggie was sixty-seven at that point. She had a prognosis of five years, perhaps six. She told the two of them, “Look. Stop with that. Just spend the time with me instead of trying to find a way to cheat death. Nobody lives forever.” She smiled faintly at Astra. “Except you, of course.”

Maggie hadn’t lost a hair off of her head but it had all turned white as snow and it was beautiful, as the wrinkles around her eyes were beautiful because it looked as if she was permanently smiling. She was the neighborhood’s sweet old lady who distributed the best candy at Halloween and gave the neighborhood teenagers real talk when she caught them sneaking back into their homes late at night. She never told their parents, but they did tend to straighten up and fly right after that, whatever she said to them.

Maggie wanted the three of them to spend time together as they used to. So for the next six years, Alex and Astra took her to the beach, and Astra carried her down to the water because she couldn’t manage her balance on the sand anymore, and she gently set her down and let her stand in the gentle lapping of the bay. They went to the street fairs that she liked and Maggie rode piggy-back as Astra marched her around to all the booths and Alex won her a giant stuffed penguin at the shooting game because her marksmanship had not deteriorated, Rao knew, and neither had her ability to shake down carnies.

They visited Paris, which Astra loved, and Rome, and Rio, where Maggie’s family was from. They saw the world together, bringing Maggie to everything she ever wanted. They ate beignets in the South of France and paella in Barcelona and fresh fish in Mykonos, where nobody looked askance at a group of three women deeply in love with each other.

Astra took Maggie to the Catholic church, the temple of the faith she had been born into, because she said she wanted to get right with her god (or gods? Astra found the Catholics very confusing) before she died. They helped Maggie light a candle and brought her to the confession booth. After about five minutes, the black-clad priest emerged, shaking his head and stating that he could not absolve her. But her Maggie was marvelously determined. It took six months of searching before they found a priest who would, a long-haired street priest who wore blue jeans and played acoustic guitar. Alex and Astra brought her to the church every single time. She was given the funeral she wanted. Astra felt that at least she had done that much right by her.

Alex was next, seven years later. After they lost Maggie, the two of them cleaved ever tighter to one another. But Alex seemed to experience a resurgence of youthful recklessness. She got a DEO-issued artificial hip and started going off on self-assigned missions, much to the chagrin of its new director, Alison Lane (daughter of the late Lucy Lane, whom Alex and Kara had spoken of with respect and affection). Astra pleaded with her to stop, because she was technically retired, but she refused, and so Astra had no choice but to accompany her. Together they broke up two alien sex-slave rings, routed out corruption in the State Department and the DEO, and stopped an alien nanovirus from causing a nuclear meltdown in Kiev. Her Alex refused to quit dyeing her hair. Her eyes still burned. After forty years of relative serenity, she’d stopped meditating and was suddenly full of the rage she’d had when Astra met her all those years ago as enemies on the battlefield.

Alex knew she was next, and wanted to die a soldier’s death. Astra understood and respected this desire. Her beloved warrior took a Jalaxian disruptor shot to the chest, in the end. Kevlar wasn’t going to do much for that.

As Alex was never a believer in gods, she and Astra had spent time choosing together the manner of her funeral and the handling of her body. She chose cremation, and Astra spread her ashes along the beach where they spent summers, she and Maggie and Alex, surfing and eating boardwalk fries and watching the sunset on the water.

With both her beloveds gone, the world lost its color for Astra. It felt like the films in black and white that Maggie used to show her. Food tasted like ash. She took no joy in anything; even combat lost its thrill. Victory was hollow because her loves were not there to share it with her. There were young people, women especially, but men too, who looked at her with desire, because she was as impressive and beautiful as ever, but she could not begin to fathom starting again with someone else. They all seemed so painfully young to her. And nothing could replace what she had built and lived in so deeply for all those years. She had Kara, still, but she felt caught again in the strange space between life and death.

She sought out the company of her sister’s AI. It was talking to a ghost, which felt somehow fitting. Astra gave her memories and created a second AI, for Kara to consult with after she was gone. And then, she gave her body to the cause, one last time.

It came on an unremarkable day. The seeds of hatred had been replanted and she was faced once again with an insurgent group armed with technology aimed at killing her and aliens like her. She took the hit. She took it willingly, knowing what she did. She brought them down. And she went down with it. She felt her life drain away and she waited, glad that she had died a warrior’s death and that she would be soon reunited with her beloveds.

She woke in a large waiting room that seemed to stretch into infinity both to the left and the right, lined with door after door, some of which were dark, some of which emanate peculiar lights or music or sounds, some unnerving, some not. After a moment of glancing around at the very full waiting room, she walked up to the bright, brushed steel reception desk where she was greeted with a brisk smile. “Astra In-Ze,” the woman said with a slight edge in her voice. “They’re waiting for you outside 2426-B. Don’t dawdle, please. They’ve been waiting for you to show for about ten years.”

Astra strode down the endless, brightly lit corridor, muttering the numbers under her breath, until she saw them: Maggie, and Alex, both looking as they had when they bore the blush of youth on them, and two others beside them. She broke into a run and closed the gap between them. She wrapped both of them in her arms and kissed them and her heart was again whole and she was about to weep with joy.

“Now hold on,” said one of the two others.  
She withdrew and looked at him. He was dressed in vaguely Kryptonian clothing, but something ancient, with a full head of yellow-gold hair and eyes that glowed with white light. Recognition stirred in her heart. “Rao?” she whispered.

He gazed at her benignly for a moment, and then said, “No, my child. My name is Kor, I work for Rao. In records. I’m trying to get you three straightened out.” He looked over at the other stranger. “You see? She’s one of mine.”

The other stranger folded his arms. “I know that,” he grumbled. “But she–” He pointed at Maggie. “–is one of ours. And that one–” He pointed at Alex, who was smirking like a little shit. “–is technically neither of our problems but is bonded to BOTH of these two. So.”

Alex jerked a thumb at the man, a white-bearded man in a gold tunic, with feathered wings folded against his back. “That’s Pete.”

“Peter, if you wouldn’t mind,” he groused. “ _Saint_ Peter, actually. I didn’t go to the trouble of becoming the first Pope in history to just be addressed as Pete.”

Alex snickered. “Short story, they don’t know what to do with us. Maggie’s allowed into Yahweh’s heaven, you’re allowed into Rao’s heaven, I’m not technically allowed into either one but I get to stay anyway because I’m bonded to both of you but nobody knows where we belong.”

“Well,” Kor answered Saint Peter with an increasingly snippy tone, “it seems to me that your boss isn’t a great fan of lesbians or polyamory, so I think we get the whole lot.”

Peter scratched his beard. “Yeah, well, Yahweh gets a bad rap about that stuff, honestly. People just kept rewriting that bible to the point you’d hardly even recognize it from what it was originally. And he’s relaxed a lot in the last thousand years or so, really. It’s exhausting having to explain that to people over and over.”

Kor shook his head, for a moment sympathizing with Saint Peter. “Well, look, Astra’s definitely one of ours, Maggie’s definitely one of yours. They’re bonded, so we can’t separate them unless they want that.”

“We don’t!” the three exclaimed in unison.

“So?” He pulled out a smartphone and began flipping through something or other. “There’s a bylaw about this. Sorry, bear with me, I haven’t had to look through these in a few hundred years. The precedence goes with whosoever has a longer-standing connection with their deity.”

Astra peered over his shoulder. “I am oldest,” she volunteered. “Especially when my time in the Phantom Zone is factored in.”

Kor nodded. “Now it seems….” He did some more flipping around on his phone. “…your parents were a bit late to dedicate you to Rao, but even bearing that in mind… your connection is indeed the longest-standing.”

Peter nodded. “Alright then. Congratulations. All three of them are yours.”

They shook on it.

“Follow me,” Kor said to them, gesturing to them to follow him down the hall. They linked arms, as they did when they were young, and ambled behind him, glad to be together once again.

“Now, Alexandra,” Astra sighed, “don’t you feel foolish for not having had gods?”

Alex grinned. “Nope. Because I’m still going to heaven.”

Maggie squeezed her hand. “But heaven is real. Gods are real. And you didn’t buy it. You don’t feel stupid being wrong about that?”

“Of course not!” Alex drew Maggie’s hand to her mouth and kissed it. “Come on, it strains credulity! How could I?”

Astra scowled at her, but she was laughing too. “It’s not fair. You had no faith and yet you reap the rewards of my having had it. I shall have to punish you for this, and I have eternity in which to do it.”

Maggie laughed and shook her head. “She’d like that, Astra.”

Alex nodded vigorously. “Mm-hmm. Here we are, in the afterlife, and you’re still taking care of me.” She slipped her arms, one around each of their waists. “So, Astra, tell me about Rao’s afterlife…. What do we have to look forward to?”

Astra smiled faintly. She was overwhelmed with joy to be with her two companions again. “First of all, Alexandra, there is no Call of Duty.”

“No!”

“But you won’t miss it.”

“Lies.”

“Truly. There is much lovemaking.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

“I still want Call of Duty.”

“We will see what can be arranged.”


End file.
